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The Other Half of History Columns

“The problem in the summer of 1941 was that many regular Americans were not ready for war, since their country – the United States – had not been attacked. For American Communists, however, their country – the USSR – had been attacked. They were gung ho.” Paul Kengor

World War II is unique among the five wars the United States fought in the 20th Century, in that there was virtually no left wing “peace movement” trying to undermine America’s war effort.

During the First World War, President Wilson’s government jailed or deported hundreds of war protestors, most of whom were Communists or Socialists. During the Vietnam War, leftist radicals organized a “peace movement” that eventually undermined support for the war among the broader public. Similar left wing protests took place to a smaller extent during the 1991 Gulf War and the Korean Conflict of the 1950’s.

“Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is one of this country’s most prominent historians.” Professor Eric Foner

The quote above is the first sentence on the homepage of Professor Eric Foner’s personal website. There is little doubt about who wrote this encomium, because footer of the homepage says “Copyright 2005 Eric Foner.”

Further down on the homepage the professor quotes another historian, who praises Foner in terms that would embarrass a more modest man. After praising Foner for his “voluminous scholarship,” Dr. Steven Hahn goes on to say that Foner “has had an enormous influence on how other historians, as well as a good cut of the general reading public, have come to think about American history.”

This statement is probably true, unfortunately. Dr Foner personifies everything that is wrong with academia in America, especially where history departments are concerned, and his influence is widely felt.

“To the Marxist paradigm that underlies this vision, I have no objection.” Eric Foner

College faculties tend to be very liberal – and very defensive about it. Any accusation of left wing bias makes the typical college professor fiercely indignant; and the most biased profs usually show the most indignation.

Campus Marxists have even been known to join together to form groups and publish papers to give an aura of academic legitimacy to their denunciations of their conservative critics. As far as their public image is concerned, university professors clearly want to be seen as moderate, mainstream Americans who can be trusted to give their students a well-rounded education.

When scholars write for other scholars, however, they are more candid.

“The most terrifying words in the English language are ‘we’re from the government and we’re here to help.’” Ronald Reagan

In his second inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the all-powerful federal government he was trying to build as “an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.” During his first term, he boasted, he had “made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.”

FDR was articulating one of the central beliefs of the political Left: that only good can come of making the government more powerful, and that only a more powerful government can do anything good. Individuals and businesses in the private sector, according to this view, play no constructive role in society.

“Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau’s files, ‘McCarthyism’ would probably be called ‘Hooverism.'” History professor Ellen Schrecker

During J. Edgar Hoover’s long tenure as Director, the FBI was very successful at spying on organizations hostile to the interests of the United States, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi and Communist parties. Hoover is demonized in mainstream history books because the left wing activists who write most of the textbooks resent his efforts against one of those three organizations.

For some unknown reason, College professors and other left wing extremists tend to be anti-anti-Communists, implacably hostile to anyone who ever fought against Communism in any capacity. That being the case, J. Edgar Hoover would get much more sympathetic treatment in the history books if he had restricted his anti-subversive efforts to the KKK and the Nazis.